This Week in WordPress #183

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: It's time for this week in WordPress episode, number 183 entitled purple. It was recorded on Monday. The 1st of November, 2021, my name's Nathan Wrigley. And this week I'm going to be joined by my new co-host. One of the new co-hosts Michelle Frechette, but also by Hazel Kempo and Hashim Warren there's loads to talk about, I did actually have a week off, so there's a bit of an extra backlog, but the things that we cover this week are for example, the fact that Gutenberg has rolled out 11.8 and there's a dozen or more new things involved in that the team at BeaverBuilder has got a new product called assistant pro it's a bit like Dropbox, but for your WordPress websites is going to save you a boatload of time.

And it looks really fabulous. WP chill have taken over Gutenberg forms and automate. Have relaunched their video press product so that you can self-host if you'd like your own videos, some product updates, fluent CRM has got a new version. So as main WP and happy files pro, and we talk about those WP Builds, we've got a black Friday page and we talk about that and rounding it off.

We talk about the opt-in monster vulnerability that was discovered by Wordfence. And the fact that plus may have affected 1 million websites, but it all seems to be over now. And then towards the end, we have a little bit of a chat about calming. It's all coming up next on this week in WordPress, this weekend, WordPress was brought to you by AB split test.

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Go check it out and get a free demo at AB split. test.com. Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello. Hello. Hello. Episode number 7,000,000,000,403 of the WP Builds weekly WordPress news, which we call this week in WordPress. Week off last week because I was in inverted commerce, tired after doing the page builder summit, but we're back and we're back with a vengeance.

We've got some lovely new guests. I've just been having a very brief chat with both of the, to find people you can see on the screen, but also joining us once again with some news this time around is Michelle for chef Michelle before I get to that news. Is it okay if I introduce the other two?

Absolutely.

[00:02:49] Hazel Quimpo: Please do.

[00:02:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. So first of all, there we go. Michelle Frechette is here from Stella WP. Maybe that's new. You're probably familiar with seeing the words, give WP next to Michelle's name. So there may be, maybe there's a clue there. And but also from Stella WP, we are joined by Hazel.

Now, Hazel forgive me. I forgot to ask. And I don't, exactly Kempo

[00:03:14] Hazel Quimpo: like a K not Campo. It's Filipino. So that's the Spanish.

[00:03:19] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. I was totally going to butcher that. So I'm glad I stepped out that whole your from Stella WP, tell us about what you do over there.

[00:03:28] Hazel Quimpo: And it marketing for stellar WP, which is our new adventure that we spun up this spring under the liquid web umbrella, as we're gathering more WordPress plugins and stellar WP is lead the hat for all of those things and we're heading up marketing.

[00:03:42] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. That's brilliant. Thank you. Anyway. Thank you for joining us first time. Hopefully you'll enjoy it and watch wish to come back, but also from WP engine, we've got Hashim Warren. I pretty sure I've got that name. Correct. So tell us about yourself. Hashemi it's very nice to have you on for the first time.

Great.

[00:03:58] Hashim Warren: Yeah, it's great to be on. So I work at WP engine as a product marketing manager for our Helis products. So that's Atlas, that's some of our open source products for headless, like WP graph, QL. So that's what I.

[00:04:15] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you very much. No doubt. All of us between us will be able to come up with some sense all about WordPress this week.

We've got, Hazel coming in from Los Angeles, so it's crazy early over there and Hasheem is coming in from North Carolina. And I think that's probably the same time zone as you as it Michelle, roughly speaking.

[00:04:33] Michelle Frechette: Yes, absolutely. The same time

[00:04:35] Nathan Wrigley: zone. Yes. So not crazy early like it is for hazing still fairly early.

So I appreciate you guys making the effort to to join us today. So Michelle, what's the news.

[00:04:47] Michelle Frechette: I am no longer the director of customer success. I give WP as of this morning, I am the director of community engagement for stellar dub.

Thank you very excited about the work

[00:05:05] Nathan Wrigley: I'll be doing. Okay. I can't let this go without, I want a full explanation of what this job actually entails. What are you, what's your purpose with this new job? I'd love to know.

[00:05:16] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. So with this new job, I will be working more with the community, the internal community at stellar.

So I'll be working between our brands, but also with the greater WordPress community as well, doing things like, oh, I don't know the weekend WordPress podcast and the work I do at post status. And some of those other things and looking for. Opportunities for all the people from Stella to be involved in speaking engagements and podcasting and how to just, I think of myself now as the hub of everything,

[00:05:45] Hazel Quimpo: I thought about Michelle that way for a long time, which is why to me, it was like a no brainer for Michelle to come into this role.

She's been the hub of all things, WordPress for a long time. So nationally, no official capacity, which makes me very excited.

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: My relationship with Michelle. Oh, sorry. No,

[00:06:00] Michelle Frechette: I just say I love connecting people and connecting brands to each other and helping everybody be as successful as possible. And this role was made for that.

[00:06:10] Nathan Wrigley: I, I was just about to say I've known Michelle. We've never met in the real world, but we've known each other online and we've probably spent hours and hours talking with each other online over the years. And and honestly I think this role was literally penned for your talents.

So a huge congratulations. I'm so pleased that you've landed the role. And I suspect that you'll do really rather well at it. So a graduations, hearty, congratulations. I'm ready.

[00:06:38] Michelle Frechette: I wrote what they say. They wrote the job description for you. It's true in this case because Hazel and I sat down.

[00:06:47] Nathan Wrigley: okay. Here's a list of Michelle's.

[00:06:52] Michelle Frechette: It is literally everything I've ever wanted to do.

Get into

[00:06:58] Nathan Wrigley: what oh, I just wondered if you were, it sounded like you wanted to contribute something.

[00:07:06] Hashim Warren: Oh no, I just, I'm just happy for you, Michelle. That is awesome. The right position meets the right person and started WP. There's so much energy behind that announcement and bringing everything together so fascinating.

W what you folks are doing over there. So congratulations. Yeah.

[00:07:26] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Hearty. Congratulations. Yeah we, we, we I'd love to keep talking about that, but we probably should crack on with some there's some word stuff. The first thing before we do that, if you are in the Facebook group, then you need to go to chat.restream.io forward slash Facebook, which is a real mouthful.

Isn't it? chat.restream.io forward slash FB, not Facebook. Otherwise you'll remain anonymous. You come up onto our chats with no face, just a big F and the, we don't know what your name is. That's fine. If you wish to do that, a way of getting around. If before you write anything, just write your own name.

If you go to WP Builds.com forward slash live, and you're logged into Google, you can use YouTube comments over there. And if you've got anything you want to say, please do. I would urge you if you listen to this just on the side, if you've not given it your full concentration, all good, but maybe just pause for a moment, head over to Twitter and just say, I'm watching this over on WP Builds.com/live and see if you can drag a mate or two into join in the conversation.

That would be really nice. Yeah. Isn't this

[00:08:30] Michelle Frechette: where we make the part about that. So matter.

[00:08:33] Hashim Warren: Oh,

[00:08:37] Nathan Wrigley: I do not like that name. I

[00:08:40] Hashim Warren: do not, I didn't like that name. I know they say naming is hard. Renaming is even harder, but I liked the name because I feel like it does match with their mission. I feel like Zuckerberg is serious about that mission.

I have other thoughts about. With, I want Zuckerberg to be successful in that mission, but because like, um, I actually liked the name and I liked what it seems like the process they went through to get to it, but, I can understand other perspectives on.

[00:09:16] Nathan Wrigley: It's really curious over here. The most of the news that I've consumed has really framed against Facebook in the last 18 months or so the palpable shift from Facebook is great.

Everybody's on Facebook. You who? Facebook there's been a real turning around and especially there was almost like mocking in the British press about how. How coincidentally it was that, there's a ton of stuff going on about Facebook, in, uh, Congress, I believe is the right word. And coincidentally, there's just this big rebrand going on at the same time.

It seemed, there was just lots of conspiratorial thoughts about it. But yeah, it doesn't matter

[00:09:59] Hazel Quimpo: though. Facebook's so big. I mean, I they're, they're not mission-driven anymore. They're trying to act like they're mission-driven, but they're not, but they're so big. It doesn't matter in the U S we have Walmart and everybody will say that they hate Walmart, but it's still the biggest company in America.

So it doesn't matter. This is very cynical capitalism look at the world. But to me, it's like Facebook and say all the things and, I don't use Facebook that much anymore, and I think there'll be less and less, there's different ones, but the fact of the matter is it's still the number one traffic.

In the world, you

[00:10:28] Michelle Frechette: have posted that Matt Graham posted that they renaming it Metta because they're planning on stealing all your metadata. And they're just being more forthcoming about it.

[00:10:39] Nathan Wrigley: Hello from Toronto, whoever you are. This is a Facebook user. This is somebody that hasn't

[00:10:46] Michelle Frechette: clicked that button. This is Rob Karen. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Toronto.

[00:10:52] Nathan Wrigley: The, yeah, the it's really peculiar. I, you know, I've watched the film ready player one. And if that is where Mehta is here. Then my personal opinion is I don't want to be a part of that.

I want the real world in spades. I don't want to see the real world through a set of actually I do want to see the real world through a set of glasses, but anyway, let's yeah, let's get on. Let's put some WordPress stuff up. So first thing on the Roundup today is over at WP Tavern. I've got just in Tadlock, writing a piece, all about some new features, which are coming out in Gutenberg, the plugin 11.8 dozens of new features.

It seems like there was a little bit of a hiccup. It never quite made it onto the repository for reasons that I don't fully understand, but this first little paragraph here is all about that little hiccup, but then it came and it was quite a lot of nice stuff in there. Getting to some level of maturity.

Now I won't go into the detail because I will link to this in the show notes. But if you are curious, if you're sitting on the fence about playing with Gutenberg as the plugin, then some of these things might be of interest to you. They've got this nice cover background opacity, that's the cover block where you can layer things.

This is just in Todd lock's interpretation of what he wanted to achieve with that. And it sounds like he's got a direct route into the team because he requested something. And about six months later, it landed, which is really nice. They've also got automatically generated heading anchors.

You can see them here if you're looking at the screen and hopefully this will. Come in handy later, if you create content, you'd be able to anchor things automatically, depending on what you put in the header block featured patterns. This is really interesting. This is why I think Gutenberg ultimately will be successful.

This is a set of limited patterns at the moment only 15. So 15 patterns have been created by members of the core team. And they've dropped inside this featured list, which again, if you can see it on the screen there's a little feature toggle here and 15 of them have been shown. And you can just click on them and they'll instantly drop into your site, but imagine a world in which everybody gets to create their own patterns like this, and they are put into a repository and you can just go and find whatever it is.

And you'll be able to build your WordPress websites hopefully much more quickly. Various other bits and pieces like Pinterest, oh, embed. That's something I personally don't really know a great deal about. And also a plain block style block quote style, so that you don't have to, if you don't wish it to look all dramatic and different from the rest of your text you don't have to.

So that's basically that piece in a nutshell just so that Hazel and Ashim know if at any point you want to just interrupt me or anything, that's fine. But quite often I just rub it on like this. And then at the end, say, go for it. If anybody's got anything to say, so I'm going to say.

[00:13:51] Michelle Frechette: I will say that the, the block editor has become something that's got so many bells and whistles. Now that I've lost track. It's almost like my cell phone. I use like 10% of the potential of what's there because I haven't even had time to dig into it. And it just keeps you soldiering on with more and more great things.

And I think it's wonderful. I just, I need to carve out some time to learn a little bit more about it

[00:14:15] Hazel Quimpo: and tell you, I think it's I don't know. It goes back to WordPress's whole roots of democratizing publishing because for a long time, there was a huge chasm in okay, cool. You democratize publishing.

I can go make a blog post now and figure out generally how to have a site. But if I want to have opacity behind a thing like this blocks could do, I'll need to go call somebody else and that's not democratizing publishing my opinion. This gets you a lot closer there. And I, that all of this stuff makes me super excited about where things are.

And I think that the hard thing is to. Stop talking like blocks as oh, well, let's get into blocks. Like as everybody who's been in WordPress before, and like, how do you, because that conversation is not relevant to people new to WordPress. And I think there's a weird block there of trying to block how to get people into, a block at her as like the given, as opposed to this whole conversation about it, which isn't relevant to somebody who's joined WordPress in the past year.

Even,

[00:15:13] Hashim Warren: I think last week was the first week where I was starting a new site and I decided to completely go with Genesis and, um, and, the blocks, the custom blocks we have over there plus use blocks. It was my first time doing that. And I was really surprised at myself because my last.

Was just a headless WordPress site. So it was using, blocker. Oh, I'm using ACF and I'm not using the Blackadder at all. And also I used to be big into using a beaver builder. I said, wow. Okay. And also I was you know, really active on Twitter. What is it a year and a half ago? Maybe two years ago making fun of Gutenberg.

Uh, you know, older curmudgeon has come along too because of the power of the, of Bloomberg and block editor. So I love that they're adding stuff that but they continue to add things to it and there's continued investment in it. So that's really. Yeah.

[00:16:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it really is. There's been, it's really curious.

I've got a whole bunch of friends in the WordPress community and there seems to be a real line being drawn, dividing them. And the line is called Gutenberg. And on the one hand, you've got the people who I don't want anything to do with it. And it really feels like that position is entrenched now, and they are not going to have anything to do with that.

Come what may. And then you've got the people on the other side who are experimenting and trying things out and seeing where they can go with it. And I'm on that side and I'm really enjoying all of the new things that come along and seeing. That it, the block isn't just limited to being a thing which sits on the screen.

The block can be really complicated in the background, doing, in my case, I use one called newsletter glue, which enables me to produce newsletters and fire them off to active campaign or whatever it might be. And it's a block. It just sits there and it's just fabulous. So I'm loving all of this stuff.

Andrew Palmer is also pro Gutenberg. Andrew, we going to talk about something of yours a little bit later and he also also says is purple the stellar color. He's just asking. He loves it. It's

[00:17:28] Hazel Quimpo: come up several times.

you have the same hair?

[00:17:34] Nathan Wrigley: I think, I don't know what I'm going for here.

Just going for Y we've got Peter Ingersoll. He says 100% agree that that the discussion too often leaves out the new users that only know the block editor given. Thank you, Peter. I used to have you on board today. That's really nice. Okay. Now Hashem just mentioned BeaverBuilder, I'm going to clip right along to this other piece.

This, I think I am not the best person to talk about this because I am so ridiculously excited about what this can do. I think I'm basically going to promote it, which is not my intention, but this is beaver built. Okay. This is not beaver builder, but it's the team behind BeaverBuilder. They've been touting this product.

They've had it out in alpha for ages, David Wamsley, the guy that does the podcast on a Thursday with me, he's been playing with them, giving me little bits of feedback here and there about, about what it can do. And I know as well, Paul Lacey has had a play and I would say. Just lock your wallet up if you don't want to spend any money.

Because as soon as you've seen what this thing can do, you're just going to be hemorrhaging the fee straight away. You're going to want this. This is called assistant pro and it's like Dropbox for WordPress. In fact, I'm sure they say that somewhere. Oh yeah. They like Dropbox, but for WordPress developers essentially install the plug.

And then you can just Chuck everything to do with your WordPress website. And I really do mean everything. So that could be images. It could be templates. In fact, I think they've got a lovely little list. Yes. Yeah. Here we go. Wire frames, starter content images. So that could be SVGs PNGs. And so on layout pages, entire pages of content, theme, customization, settings, color codes, basically anything that you can imagine, you can Chuck it up into a system, you go to your other website and download it.

Um, that to me is simply incredible. And then you can do things like tag it. You can have your team members in so that they can access this thing, but not that thing. And I'm just really keen to see how this goes.

[00:19:41] Hazel Quimpo: It's via their SAS service. You can have a plugin connected to your site and you run it via there.

[00:19:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yes. Hazel your, yeah, I got a real feedback from myself there just then I don't know what that was. But yes, um, my understanding is that it's running in their cloud, so it's not do, I could be wrong about this and I hope I hope I'm saying this right. If anybody knows better, please just stick something in the comments.

But I think, I think you're doing things on their cloud, so you've gotta be happy with that position. I don't think it's a, like a dedicated WordPress install a bit like, I dunno, main WP or something like that. I don't think so. So anyway, the pricing is here. It is. There's a free version, it'll have limitations.

I'm sure there's a $15. I'm guessing this is per month. Must be right. Yeah, there you go. If you do it yearly, it's $144 for one user. And if you go up to a team account, which is up to three users, it's 192. And then I think if you want more users, you can, if you've got a big agency or something, I think it's $5 a month, but.

I am addicted to online backup storage sink solutions. Like I've got them all rolling. I love it. I've no idea why I just love all that stuff. So this is right up my street, but how much time is this going to save you? If you just log into a website, first thing you do install a system, click some buttons, boom.

You've got yourself, a site. Every template that you ever wanted is just right there. Discuss,

[00:21:14] Michelle Frechette: For somebody who's freelancing or an agency, this is going to be truly a game changer because it's going to let you start things up so much faster than, loading plugins and things like that.

We all have, have had our like shortcuts that we do in the past, right? Saving that starter theme with all the plugins already attached to it, et cetera. And then, two months later you go to use it and everything's out of date because of all the plugins and things that, you've been sitting on your hard drive.

So I think, if, if it's done it's going to truly be a time saver for a lot of people.

[00:21:53] Hashim Warren: Yeah. This is really awesome. I actually didn't realize this lunch, so I'm glad we're talking about it. You know, assistant has been in a kind of alpha stage for. For years now. And when the first came out, I was a little nonplussed about it.

I was like, okay that's cool. I only continue to build BeaverBuilder because I'm a user buyer of that. But you know, everywhere I've worked, we've had issues with kind of digital asset management and kind of dam solutions. They don't they're not tailored to your CMS. So to have one that is actually tailored to your CMS is really interesting and really exciting.

So I'm glad that they actually continue to develop a system and that they're going in this direction, like teams actually share saving and sharing assets and, um, and it looks like a settings and functionality. Oh, that's really cool.

[00:22:52] Hazel Quimpo: Yeah. I saw Andrew, Andrew say that there's a couple other folks doing similar things around.

I know that he had done something similar and I know. Cadence cloud has one of these two. And even I-Team saying naturally just tell it my own brand, but it's just the ones I'm very familiar with. And I know that they're dancing around this, but this one seems, it seems very cool. And that there's something I'm excited.

Like you are Nathan, this is like type of thing that makes life so much easier.

[00:23:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. The nice thing about this is the UI is right there. So you can instigate it at any point. This little pencil icon just follows you around on the website and you click on it wherever you may be. And so it's not like you would have to go off to a separate settings page or anything like that.

It just follows you around all over the place and you click it and this panel just pops out. And you know, ah, what was that image? So you can search it. You can color code things like you can do in the finder on macro S all those kinds of things, and obviously share things with your teammates and chat with your teammates and all of that kind of stuff in there.

It just seems like they've really thought about this. And like her, she was saying, this is. In the oven for a really long time. And those guys, they do it right. I think they, they take the time to mature a product. They take the time to listen to feedback and I just think this is going to be an absolutely huge success.

It's not going to be for everybody. They do go, they go into pains to make out on the website that it's compatible you may be thinking this is beaver builder only. They make the point that no, that's in fact not the case. Oops, sorry. Hiding, showing, hiding, showing BeaverBuilder Gutenberg element or DV vision, just saying they didn't

[00:24:25] Hazel Quimpo: decide to use their own brand clout to sell this product.

[00:24:31] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Interesting choice. Yeah, maybe they're trying to exactly that. Just trying to separate the two so that I feel that you probably

[00:24:38] Hazel Quimpo: are, but that's always a challenge. WordPress companies are always spinning up other companies and there's always a challenge of whether you want to use some of your name recognition or risks, confusing people.

And I think there's, it's a give and take always, I can see that they struggle. Yeah, it's a hard thing.

[00:24:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Hey, brilliant product. I think go check it out, go and have a look. It looks really good to me. Anybody else think we've all had a little bit of a bash on that one? So that's great. I'll move on.

This is interesting. Manea Kamau. Started a plugin a little while ago, probably like 18 months, two years ago called Gutenberg forms. And what a great idea. So you build your forms inside the block editor. So you drag in it. I don't know a text area block and you drag in a check box block, and you drag in a sub a button block or whatever.

It might be a submit block and you build your forms that way. Okay. When was it? It was at some point earlier this year, I believe Manea was he went over to extend defy. He was hired by them and the plugin sat and hasn't really done a great deal just in Tadlock, Scott, this piece on WP Tavern called WP chill takes over Guttenberg forms plans to shake up the free.

market. And so this company, UWP chiller, who I confess, I have not heard of them before, but they have decided to take it over. They've got another rival product called Kali K a L I forms. And I don't know if they're going to run the two concurrently or merge the code base. There was something about that in the article, but I've forgotten, but they hope to take this on and enable people to have a free, totally free form solution.

They've taken it over from a extended family who looks like they weren't going to do anything with it. And so maybe just keep your eyes on this eye again, in the same way that I'm into backup and sync solutions. I have a license with just about every form plugin for no good reason. I just love buying form plug-ins and when a really nice one comes along, that's free.

This really piques my interest and it just seems like a real. Perfect interface to build forms in Gutenberg. It just seems really good. So any thoughts on a free form solution coming around the corner?

[00:26:56] Hashim Warren: I love that. I'm sorry. Yeah. I love that when this developer that when Gutenberg came out, they didn't just feel like, okay, forms are solved already, but Gutenberg is a new, almost like a new platform to rethink how you can do a form and not just move over legacy forms and squeeze it into Gutenberg returns to the interface and also in terms of the capabilities, but to Reese, but to say, okay, what would a form builder be like in this world?

And also to make it free and simple, it was really exciting. And like we were talking about earlier, uh, there's a lot of talk of people like us. Who've been using. We're pressed for a long time. What about that brand new person? Like what form builder do you hand that brand new person who just needs a simple contact us form for their

[00:27:54] Hazel Quimpo: side, right?

[00:27:55] Hashim Warren: You say oh, and install this paid, form builder that again, the interface is squeezed and the Gutenberg. So I love that they're rethinking what's the day one for all the new people who are coming into WordPress, which is really exciting.

[00:28:13] Hazel Quimpo: That's where I am on it too. And especially, and there's expectation, especially if you're a new person coming to WordPress, you've probably messed around building, at least in my space. I better, like this, like any website you probably messed around and you've never had to search for a solution for a form. In fact, it's almost outrageous to you that you have to find an outside solution just for a form field.

And I think integrating that stuff into the block editor. Like the, almost the most important thing we can possibly do. Like those kind of stuff that people have expected expectations that they can just do without thinking image compression you know, forms these types of things you don't even think about other places of the internet.

I think as more of that becomes part and parcel of the block editor, it makes it more powerful for everybody. Okay.

[00:28:57] Nathan Wrigley: I'm not quite sure why we don't have something like this in core, actually, I guess if we're trying to serve 90% of the people, there's maybe 10% who don't need a form, but it's very rare that I've ever put a website together where there wasn't some kind of contact us form.

So a simple stripped down solution like this just seems so the contact

[00:29:16] Hazel Quimpo: form seven is just filled that those shoes were so long.

[00:29:20] Hashim Warren: I'm gonna mess this up. I know, but I remember there was a debate about there being like a form API that's in core built forms off of, and that I believe. I believe something like who are our friends, it's another PHP based CMS Drupal.

And I believe Drupal has that. So it's not this whole collection of four companies, producing forms in a different way. I might be messing up some of the details, but it's interesting that we don't have a native canonical way to capture that data and store that data. Everyone's just making their own uh, database for form fields.

And you can have three different ones with three different forms, solution products, but that could be a good thing. A lot of people are working at these different companies that make form. So maybe that's a good thing.

[00:30:19] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. There's so many different needs for forms and so many different directions.

So give WP as a form solution, but it's a specific form solution and it fits that specific niche of fundraising. And all the different things that come along with the needs for fundraising. And so I think it's almost impossible to come up with a one. Solution for every person form wise. But that said the basic contact form.

Absolutely. That's one of the simplest things that we can solve in a, in something with a black, like the block editor.

[00:30:51] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I think you've got to imagine that something like this, if it works and it's robust it's pretty quickly gonna rise to the top of the repo. It'll have hundreds of thousands of installs and it'll get recognized and there's probably going to be a load of rivals maybe free or commercial don't know.

But for now I'm just glad that something like this is no longer languishing because it wasn't the direct, it wasn't the reason that they brought Komal over it just so happened that this came along and stagnated. So I'm really pleased at what was it w P chill. Thank you for taking this and running with it.

Let's see. Let's see where you go. Okay. This is community news. We haven't had community news for the longest amount of time, not actual real world community news. This is to say that this isn't new news, although. New to me. I'd have my head buried in the sand. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We'll go with recent.

That's good. WordCamp Europe, 2022, which happens, which is happening this time around in Porto. It got canceled, ah, in good grief. Was it 20? It was 2020, right? Yeah. You remember that year? It's just there were dinosaurs when the the, it got canceled. It totally got called off. Everything else did.

And we've had this sort of up and down. Should we go back? Should we do real world events? Should we postpone them? The, my understanding is that the big word camps, like the word camp, us and word com EDU, they have some kind of different relationship in terms of what they can do. So a city based one like London or something that they have more constraints, but so a lot of those are not going to take place.

This one is going to have. The one in Porto is happening. Tiny little date there, but it says it's happening. When was it? I saw it. I saw it anyway. I can't remember the date, but it's next year. Now, the reason I'm raising, sorry, go on Michelle. I said,

[00:32:48] Michelle Frechette: I think it's in June, but I'm not a hundred

[00:32:50] Nathan Wrigley: percent on that.

Thank you. The reason I'm raising it is because they are in need of volunteers. I don't know how. Daya the need for volunteers is but I think they are looking for people actively who are willing to commit a bit of time there. And so that's what this piece is. I'm going to link to it in the show notes, but just so that, if you're, if you're inclined, go to europe.wordcamp.org, and then it's forward slash 2022 and then forward slash Porto dash is dash calling.

Ooh, pithy, and go and check it out and apply now to be a volunteer. Obviously these kinds of events, they simply can't happen, but okay. Let's throw the cat amongst the pigeons. What's what are your thoughts about real world events? I know this has got nothing to do with WordPress. It's got to do with medicine and pandemics and all of that, but are you guys ready to do something like this?

Again? I don't mean volunteer. Actually attend.

[00:33:48] Hazel Quimpo: Yeah. I work in events on the side and I have. I I'm deep in the trauma of COVID and the world of events. I had to cancel my Coachella for kids, a little Palooza that I have 4,000 people at each year at the Capitol, all my events. This past weekend, I went to a, a movie theater that had a live orchestra playing and it was fine and I felt great about it.

And I'm more than ready to go to events like I'm ready. But yeah,

[00:34:21] Hashim Warren: I am too. I went to my first um, I went to a play well, it was two weeks ago and I went to another play on Friday. Um, I, I like, I feel more comfortable at events if I know exactly what the parameters are beforehand, and I know that those will be a force and everyone is going to be cool.

I don't want to go to events where you know, that there's not some type of, just a social distancing mask wearing I, I want to know that

[00:34:56] Hazel Quimpo: color,

[00:34:57] Hashim Warren: et cetera, right? Let me know the protocol. And then I can make my decisions about which part of the event to go to how to keep myself safe. I can answer questions for my family as they have questions, but I went to a, I went to a conference a few months ago and I was shaky on going to that conference.

But I liked that they held to, to protocol and then I went to, to to place. So I'm ready to go back, but I still want just to at least know what the protocols are so I can make a good.

[00:35:33] Michelle Frechette: We talked about this recently on the underrepresented in tech podcast as well, because there's so many people in some of our underrepresented communities that have either poor access to vaccinations and things like that, or who are immunocompromised in the disability world.

And so we did talk about that on there, and I'm actually writing a post that was bounty read for for the WP minute about the return to in person events and my personal stance on it for myself is I am ready. I am an immunocompromised person. I am fully vaccinated. I do have my masks and my hand sanitizers and things like that.

And as somebody who lives alone and yes, I do have people who use on Jeff walk by a little bit ago. I do have people that work with me. So I'm not completely isolated, but as somebody who's lived alone through a pandemic, I am so ready to be among people. And. We did have my daughter's wedding in person back in may.

And it felt so good to see people like en mass and I don't dance, but watching people dance and being able to sit down and talk to people was it was quite for

[00:36:40] Hazel Quimpo: yeah, it's not like a slight glimmer of hope, basically over the weekend of. I felt like a little bit. And if you like, we'll get used to living with this thing as vaccines become the normal, and it'll be a thing.

And maybe the thing is you won't get horribly sick after every event you go to in life. Not even just COVID right? Remember, like you just get sick anytime you travel. And maybe now people will be like less gross in life.

[00:37:03] Nathan Wrigley: This is Chris uses comment, which is I can see this is, this seems to be where I am out a little bit, says I've done nothing, but do food shopping since February, 2020.

I want to see, I want to see bond. This is, the new bond film. But sitting in a stuffy cinema for three hours, doesn't seem quite right just yet at the UK. Yeah. I think in the UK, we are, things are not going as well as they could be, but I would love to come and see Porto come to Porto next spring to w CEU.

Yeah, to Hashim's point. I would want to see what the guidelines were and. Totally confident that whatever was published would be what we'd get, having been to a multitude of WordPress events. I am certain that everybody's going to sit by, like I say, everybody, I can't speak for everybody, but the majority of the people that show up would go there in good faith and would honor whatever was committed to, whether that's mask masking up or standing away from people at a certain distance or capacity on the rooms or the amount of tickets being sold and so on and so forth if it was published and maybe it is, I haven't explored it, but if it was on the website and I could see it in black and white and it felt okay, that's, I'm on the right side of that.

Then I would feel like really reassured by that, because I know that these events are run incredibly well. But I don't want to say that.

[00:38:28] Hashim Warren: Yeah. And that's the hard part too. You know, well, everyone else obey the rules and that's always the. Part, because, I'm going to an event, it's still a risk and it's okay, let me weigh the risk.

And everyone obeying the rules, much less risk you know, no one doing that much higher risk. So it's um, that's the tricky part of going to events. Like you have to trust that the community that you're going to be a part of is going to obey those rules. And for some reason I felt like the theater was one where they would have made the rules or the two shows that the two plays I went to I don't feel the same way about a movie theater.

I think as soon as lights are down, mass massacre off and people are eating popcorn is just a different atmosphere in a movie theater. So when it comes to the M word parts event, I would actually trust that people know. Kind of obeyed the rules. I was just respect for the

[00:39:28] Nathan Wrigley: community. You've got to imagine as well, it being Portugal and let's say it is June.

The it's going to be hot, so the air-con will be on. So all the filtering will be happening. Which is kind good. Andrew Palmer, he's already made his decision. He's booked his flight. He's got his Airbnbs ready to go. That's cool. And it was Rob. Hi, um, Rob Cannes for me, it depends on the size of the event.

Yeah. Good point. I'll have a season ticket for the Toronto Raptors and we'll not go oh, 20,000 people. Not good, but smaller events I would go to. Yeah, that's a good point. You know, if the event, cause this is a massive auditorium, it's truly huge. And if they really limit the ticket numbers and they can show, look, you'll be this far away from people that could make a big difference.

I guess the Toronto Raptors. A bit more confined. I don't know. And one last one, oh, no. Silver lining says Peter I've been able to attend far more online than I would ever have been able to afford money and time if everything was just in person. Good point. And I'm sure that we'll have a ton of hybrid events where stuff is broadcast live.

Cause just why not? And one last one from Chris, I feel WP would be, I feel WP would be the same. Everybody goes into WP. A community seems to have the same sort of mindset. Yes. We love our community. It's a nice one. Okay. Are we done with the Porto thing? I think we probably

[00:40:57] Hazel Quimpo: in second

[00:40:57] Michelle Frechette: through fourth, I did look up the dates.

Oh, thank

[00:40:59] Nathan Wrigley: you. June the second through the fourth, this common. Yeah. This is, uh, something else. This is an automatic project. I honestly had not even heard of this. This is called video press. It seems like it's been sitting there being an automatic project for a fairly lengthy period of time, but they've decided to dust it off and imagine Vimeo, like you're paid a Vimeo account where you upload video and you stick it on your website.

Only. This is all done through your WordPress website and having got the summit, which finished a couple of weeks ago. We, we could really have done with something like this and didn't even know it exists. So you upload the videos, you get a terabyte of storage, depending on your tier it's for com and for.org.

If you do it on the.org side, I think you have to have a jet pack tier paid tier, which I think starts at, I think the first year is about $4 or four pounds a month. Something like that. We'll look at the price in a minute, but the, it just looks really great. It's it's exactly what you'd expect. You can have brand less videos or, in other words, you don't get the YouTube branding or the Vimeo branding and all of that kind of stuff.

And it obviously works seamlessly inside of the Gutenberg block editor. And it looks like they've decided to just put a bit more marketing umph into it because now we've got people talking about it and posts being created about it. Let me find the pricing. Cause that's what everybody wants to know.

Where was the pricing? There we go. Let me click through to that. It is you have to scroll down, video, press, they go for. For golden spawns, UK pounds per month, maybe that's dollars as well. That's for the first year after that, you're going to be paying eight pounds and you get terabyte of storage works with the block editor ad free and brandable and on limited sessions.

So this would be perfect for my event. Yep.

[00:42:59] Hazel Quimpo: My biggest question is, does it contribute to SEO? Wistia does cause Wistia, right? Whiskey is like real big on having your own. That's like their whole value prop with DHEA. You can have your own videos on your website, but the thing is it per contributes to like SEO people, search your things, your video comes up as your content.

And that's what I'm curious on this one.

[00:43:19] Nathan Wrigley: How do they do that? What do they do? Is it like a T do they transcribe it? Yeah, but I know,

[00:43:23] Hazel Quimpo: I know that sounds like content in your site with CF.

[00:43:28] Hashim Warren: I know a little bit about that. Google, they recognize a certain video, metadata and Wistia does that automatically for you.

And there was a little bit of a time where Google no longer uh, was recognizing, videos that were on a site. And they said they will only surface videos from a video based site. But then without me knowing, I don't know if they made an announcement about it, but then I started to see single pages with the video come up again, which was good for Wistia, YouTube

[00:44:04] Hazel Quimpo: videos only though, or other videos.

[00:44:06] Hashim Warren: They were doing other video sites too. So YouTube plus, but in my usage, I was seeing mostly YouTube when I would go to Uh, and then it feels like they changed it back to where now I go and I'll see a scene of a video off SIA individual person's video. That's Wistia

[00:44:29] Hazel Quimpo: was trying to fight again for that video tab being only YouTube, basically.

[00:44:32] Hashim Warren: It looks like it's come back now. So that'll be really interesting if this product also publishes the proper metadata so that so that it can be recognized.

[00:44:43] Nathan Wrigley: I am. I don't have any insight into that. I've just got a quick brief scan through, but here's the, the value proposition. Anyway, let's say customizable player with colors that match your site's design.

So you, this is Vimeo basically. Isn't it adaptive bit rates to deliver high quality playback grades, performance speeds, picture and variable playback speed. That's interesting. What's the picture in picture? How does that work? Private video options that you offer exclusive content to subtract.

That's quite nice. Multi-user access varies, easier collaboration on limited hosting with Jetpack plans or wordpress.com no intrusive ads or imposing banner. So it doesn't mention anything about SEO in particular bot for me, if I can do. Okay. So I don't do masses of video content, but if I did do masses of video content I don't know, half a dozen a day, and I had to go over, upload it on one platform, then drop it in with an I-frame or something that's quickly adding up to wasted time.

And for the price, I think this is quite a compelling offer if you're always inside of WordPress and for linear video,

[00:45:48] Hashim Warren: I think the price is fantastic. And now that they've picked up development with with this app, I hope that they pick up with edit flow. I used to use it years ago. They acquired it and now it's dead.

So Hey please, automatic, please pick up, edit flow, and start developing now.

[00:46:07] Nathan Wrigley: Did you so this is our sorry guys. This was not in the show notes, but it just suddenly came into my mind. I'm just going to put this back on the screen. Have you any of you guys come across this thing, this is CloudFlare getting all super cheap in basically just like kicking it, kicking Amazon's prices out of the park.

So they've got a whole new suite of tools, CloudFlare, and it encompasses almost everything that Amazon would do, but the costs are. small. I was talking to Dan maybe the other day, cause he does an awful lot of video for WordCamp London and word Fest. And he was saying that it's, it's literally hundreds of times cheaper.

It's brand new. So nobody's using it at the moment. But I just thought I'd drop that in there. It's called . I wonder

[00:46:57] Hazel Quimpo: why that makes me always curious, right?

[00:46:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. And they really are. There's loads of things that they've just launched in this one week. It was about, I don't know, a couple of months ago to no FunFair as far as I can see, I didn't pick up on any of it in the technology press.

Dan was the one that showed it to me, but it's everything. Dan is I think going to use it because the economics are so compelling. I think he said something. Okay. So forgive me if these numbers are wrong. I think he, he worked out, he was just trying to work out some numbers and I think he said something along the lines of, if it costs a thousand dollars in on S3 it'll cost $4.

With CloudFlare stream, is that magnitude cheaper, Dan? Sorry for completely misrepresenting you. If that was a lie, but I will pay pay

[00:47:48] Hashim Warren: same week during the same week. They also announced the product that competes with S3 the product, but also dramatically cheaper. So let's say you were, I used to run a course.

I had to deliver, I allowed downloadable video and you know, I had to put it on. I actually used the service put it on S3 for me. So with this you know, dramatically cheaper is great. So video streaming, cheaper video hosting, if someone who's a downloaded. I wonder how they make it cheaper, but I'll take cheaper every day.

[00:48:27] Nathan Wrigley: Let's get it right.

[00:48:28] Michelle Frechette: The thing to remember is that you're always paying somehow. So if it's free or reduced price, somehow you're giving up something out. So it's an information or it's, something like that. So they're back to Metta again. I think

[00:48:47] Nathan Wrigley: Michelle, we need to book down in so that you can thoroughly explain it to us.

He was on and he was on a couple of weeks ago. And I can't remember if we pummeled him about this, but I don't think we did, but yeah. Check it out.

[00:48:57] Hashim Warren: Cloudflare's institutional investors. For me and, so they can capture,

[00:49:07] Michelle Frechette: I love your heart.

[00:49:10] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's nice. Anyway, that this all started because of us talking about the, the, the automatic solution. What was it called again? Video press. You can find that I guess just Google video press, but it looks pretty compelling to me. I think because we're doing the summit inside of WordPress.

It may be a compelling offer for us to go and look at. And at that price point, it seems pretty good. And then we've got sidetracked.

[00:49:34] Hashim Warren: Just one, one thing really quickly. I wonder what video press is using a behind the scenes. Are they using you know, has, has video streaming become cheaper. Now video press can use.

Cloud provider, like CloudFlare that's cheaper.

[00:49:54] Hazel Quimpo: I was wondering, I was like, what are you running back there?

[00:49:56] Nathan Wrigley: They pointed at my head. Yeah, that's a good point. I don't know. It doesn't actually say on this promotional page, but I'm sure if you dug deeper or maybe somebody in the comments can help us out with that, but you need a word.

They've

[00:50:08] Hazel Quimpo: developed a website, their landing page, a website, their marketing sites.

[00:50:11] Nathan Wrigley: So is that video press.com? I'm guessing. Yeah. Okay. Let's see where that goes. Video press.

[00:50:18] Hazel Quimpo: That's a pretty nice bite that there. It's, it's new. It looks like, but it's nice to find

[00:50:22] Nathan Wrigley: it's similar. Isn't it? Any stats on where it comes, where it it's very, very brief, but it basically says the same sort of thing.

Anyway, go and check it out. If you've got video hosting need or you've got clients that need that kind of stuff that might be worth looking at okay. Three in very quick succession. Without much need to talk much about it. I'm just going to mention, I like to mention when a product updates and I get notified about it.

I like to put it in this rundown. First one is that fluency. They're the guys behind fluent forms, as well as a bunch of other stuff. They just launched a social platform called WP social ninja. I think it's called they've released with a ton of new stuff. It's imagine like active campaign or something like that.

Built inside of WordPress. They run a CRM and send out emails with all sorts of interesting triggers. It's really fully fleshed out. They've got a body boss integration Thrivecart, which is a payment gateway, not a payment gateway. It's like a payment solution. You can connect it to Stripe and PayPal and all that.

Learn, press integration and a whole load more. And when they say a whole load more, they're not joking. This article is massive. They do a great job of updating their customer base. They produce these huge bits of content and it just goes on and on. So it really does seem like a massive deal.

So if you haven't updated that one. Go and update it. Oh, look, they've got a Halloween sort of deal thing going on 40% off as well. That could be good. Main WP. I'm a big user of main WP. I love this product and they've got a recent update. It mostly it's for the people that are using it. They've moved things around inside the interface.

So a box that was once here has gone over here to make less clicks and make life a little bit more easy, but. Get it updated. That's the other one. And lastly, this is a YouTube video. The guy Thomas behind the new bricks builder, a WordPress page builder, he's got a wonderful product called happy files and it bakes basically makes your.

Your media library and WordPress in WordPress, what you wanted it to be, not what it is. It puts things into files, but it's not just your media library. You know, you could do things by date or by category, but you can do anything. You can file and categorize posts or your custom post types. So I don't know, maybe you produce marketing pieces and rather than just have it as a tag, you could actually make a folder for posts and things and shove them all into that folder.

It's got a nice big fat update. He's sort taken his foot for a little while off developing bricks so that you can return to happy files. I'm a really happy user of theirs. It genuinely makes the WordPress media library a nice place to hang out.

[00:53:03] Hazel Quimpo: So logical. It makes

[00:53:04] Nathan Wrigley: sense. Yeah. So it feels like when it says happy files, it feels like it's doing.

But it does so much more than media. It really, anything more or less that's in that you are interacting within WordPress, that you've created, you can put it into a folder and a file. And it's brilliant. It's really, really good. And there was a load of things that were requested and you can see just from that little choice updated about 10 different things.

And I watched the video from start to finish. It was like 35 minutes long. I can't believe I was that captivated by a video about file system in WordPress with you go it's brilliant. So hat tip to him really good. Don't know if anybody's got anything to say about that. Okay, let's move on very quickly.

I have got I every year I do this. I'm putting together a black Friday page, so if you've got a WordPress deal that you want to put onto this page, we get quite a lot of traffic to this page each and every year. But if you want your product, it's searchable filterable, you can sort click this thing and say, I want to see the design ones only, or the admin ones only, or whatever it might be.

You can do that. And we are looking for a, we're looking for people to sponsor this page. If you're interested in that click this button. But also if you've got a product or a service in the WordPress space, click this button and you'll go to a page, fill out the form and we'll stick it on. It's totally free.

But anyway, there you go. That is. WP Builds.com forward slash black WP build.com forward slash black, right from happy news to certain news. Opt-in monster, word funds website. They've got a, they've got a vulnerability, which they've spotted opt-in monster, a million sites. Wow. And this vulnerability, which if you're using word funds, I think is automatically the firewall is now in place to deal with this.

Even if you're on the free version, they basically it made it possible for any authenticated user to export sensitive information and add malicious JavaScript to your site. That's really bad, but it would seem that they are quite an incredible company because it looks like they got contacted by word funds and they patched it within a day.

Wordfence then went back and said, actually your patch. As introduced a different set of things, and then they patch that immediately as well. So that's that to me is all it's as good as you can get, like code is going to have vulnerabilities, no matter how good you think you are, some adversary is better than you probably.

And if you if you can get in touch with that company and they turn around within 24 hours and say we've tried to fix it. That's great. Really, it gives me great confidence in that product.

[00:55:57] Michelle Frechette: Yeah. I saw somebody tweet and I wish I could give credit to who it was, but I don't recall saying something about the fact that hackers must love the word fence log, because it says go exploit all these things before people do the whole.

[00:56:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's curious. I th their business model is a really interesting one and it's a difficult path to trade isn't it? Because they've obviously got to, they've obviously got to be profitable and. Being profitable, they offer a free version. So they can't give everything away in the free version.

Otherwise the paid version is meaningless. And so they've got this month window in which if you're on the free version, you have to wait for a month for those patches to come across. And if you're on the premium version, the paid version, all of those patches are applied to the instant they find out about them, but they always seem to put the notifications out.

I could be wrong about this, but I think I'm right after their free version has been updated. So I'm hopeful that they're not letting Andrew, making, putting people at risk. It

[00:57:00] Michelle Frechette: just they'd made, it was one of those things that make you go.

[00:57:03] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Doke. Next one. This came from you, didn't it.

Michelle, you want. I don't know, it's not up yet. I put it on the screen. Let me do that very quickly. They go look Bertha, AI,

[00:57:18] Michelle Frechette: Bertha, AI. I just, this has come across my my, uh, I don't even know if the right word, but I see this recently and this is put out by and I thought it was super interesting that we have people working specifically within WordPress now to get that AI based content.

We were talking a little bit before the show and Hazel had some great ideas about ways to use this, besides just building a 10,000 word blog. So I'm going to let Hazel MOSART take.

[00:57:47] Hazel Quimpo: I'm obsessed with these much to the chagrin of a copywriter who works on my team. She is out of work. She's not, she's actually, I do use her she's an excellent writer and he's there all the time, but I will say what we talk about it, every now and then, and what happened the other day was like showing her a landing page I created.

And she was like, oh, that's a good headline, Lauren. You're going to be,

[00:58:14] Nathan Wrigley: oh no. Oh dear. Yeah. And it was AI generated. Yeah. But I

[00:58:21] Hazel Quimpo: will say it does like, I, for seller, I represent eight brands, so if I have to spin up a headline, it's all of these bots and they all run on the same API. They run on the opening I API.

So I was just using that same open AI, API and trained at a different. But copied out AI driver's data.ai. They're all running on the same API. And I use it all the time for just throwing in a product description and giving me headlines or like quick little placeholder copy. And to me. I don't know, I've got some big secret plans up my sleeve that hopefully in six months we'll be talking about something very exciting with this.

This is super exciting stuff to me. Like I'm super into this and I think this would kill like Lauren, if assumption not exist anymore, it was my lorem ipsum should be dead.

[00:59:11] Nathan Wrigley: Look at, who's just commented. I don't know if you know this Hazel, but it's actually, co-founded by Andrew Palmer.

[00:59:18] Hazel Quimpo: Andrew.

I'm just like I'm into that. We should talk. I'm super into this.

[00:59:22] Nathan Wrigley: The this is Vito Paluch and an Andrew Palmer collaboration. I've actually done a recording with them, which will be coming out on the podcast. In a matter of weeks, we recorded that a couple of weeks ago. So it's fairly fresh. And the premise of this is exactly as you've just said, it's to create all sorts of different pieces of content, but not with a mind to let's just blast out AI content across the internet without checking it.

The intention is. Just to give you a hand and make it so that, you can spin out 10 different SEO based titles in literally no time at all. It might be a matter of seconds. It was quite interesting on the podcast episode that we recorded veto, he shuffled off somewhere and then he came back with possible titles for the podcast episode.

Really good. This just all happened in real time. Andrew wants to make the point though, that there's a free thousand word option. So if you're a light content creator, that is to say, if you're not creating a great deal of content, then then you can get a thousand words for free. It's called Bertha B E R T.

A did I get the aid that I just wandered off somewhere in my head, B E R T H a dot a I and the, the thing here is that it's built inside a WordPress. So you're probably familiar with things like Jarvis and ones that Hazel mentioned that are SAS platforms. So you go over there, create staff, copy it, bring it over here, paste it into WordPress.

The thing here is that it's it's all done inside the WordPress editor. You can't really see it too well from that screen. So let's make it a little bit bigger, but you click the little icon. There's like a little robot icon in the corner and in swings a menu, you fill out them and you run through the little wizard each time.

And boom goes away. Comes back in a few seconds with some suggested content, which you can then obviously modify and Chuck into the appropriate part of your website. Yeah. Interesting stuff. Anybody got anything on that? Apart from me and Hazel? My

great-grandmother

[01:01:32] Nathan Wrigley: sorry. Let me ask Michelle that and then I'll come to you.

Has she, if that's sorry,

[01:01:38] Michelle Frechette: you just say my great-grandmother's name was Bertha and so I just thought it was pretty cool.

[01:01:42] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's kinda nice. That's pretty cool.

[01:01:45] Hashim Warren: Yeah. I remember using one of one of those products um, when they first came out of the right landing page. But having it actually integrated into WordPress is really cool.

[01:01:59] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. My fear about all of this, because I'm dreadful and wear a tinfoil hat when I'm not doing the show. I I, I sort had this conception that really, we would be drowning in too much content and essentially on nefarious people who are just doing black hat SEO would just be clicking the 10,000 word article button over and over again.

And then just flooding the internet with stuff that well, nobody's got time to read as an SEO play. But I, I, I listened to what they were saying in the podcast and it seems that Hazel you've got it perfectly. You're just putting it out there to give you some ideas for stuff that you really.

Have time, or maybe you're just not inspired at that moment in time, and this can offer that exactly

[01:02:45] Hazel Quimpo: what it is. It's really just a time-saver of give me something.

[01:02:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah. But it can do long content. It can do short content. It can do all sorts, but the website that you want to be checking out is Bertha.

Diane, thanks for bringing that to our attention again. Michelle, that was great. Thank you so much. You brought us another one as well. Haven't you've gone an only gone an adult two. This is find it WP. What's the, yes.

[01:03:13] Michelle Frechette: This is part of the new hero press network, actually here a pro network.com I think is the other link I sent you.

And so the hero presses is actually expanding greatly beyond just the hero, press new, articles and essays that they've brought you for years. And now becoming just a hub of the WordPress community. And one of the first products that they've delivered to us is find a WP. It's a freestyle. You can enter your business in here.

So if you've got a plug in, if you're a hosting company, any of those kinds of things, you could see all the lists on the right hand side here, but you can filter your resources and all, and you can S you can search for businesses within it. And so I think it's brilliant what they've done here.

And I think in their first week they had over 500 or a thousand businesses submit right away within just the first couple of days. And so I think this is something that could really grow definitely part of the hero press network. And, they're, they're really. Amassing a little corner of the web for themselves and really putting things out there to support the WordPress community in a really great

[01:04:21] Nathan Wrigley: way.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really nice. The the, I don't know what the total number of things are at the moment, but you can see, it's not just limited to one particular area. I think basically if you touch WordPress in any way, shape or form, you can get yourself on here. It looks like you, you fill out that I haven't yet filled this out for the WP Builds, but I am going to, I've literally got it open in another tab.

So for as an example, podcasts is fine. They'll accept podcasts. That's one thing, but it could be the Europe. What you saw didn't you could be uh, where's it gone? Where's it gone a hosting company, or you could be a page builder or you could be some,

[01:04:58] Michelle Frechette: the VP coffee talk is on here already. I have a bunch of brands I still have to put in here that I represent in different way shapes and forms.

So those will all be coming in there's to

[01:05:08] Nathan Wrigley: take to complete. Is it.

[01:05:11] Michelle Frechette: Oh, maybe three or four minutes. Yeah. It's just there, there's a place, an opportunity to write about your product or about your, your project. And so that might, if you haven't already thought about what that would look like, that would be the part that would take the longest time to to fill

[01:05:27] Hazel Quimpo: it.

It's hard to all their projects. Like this is like the goats, anybody that has something on WordPress should be here first, as like go list your things. And I love how involved they are and really caring about the WordPress community.

[01:05:42] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, they've got a fairly decent category. Taxonomy lists down the side.

You know, you come under the umbrella of accessibility agencies, communities, content, copywriting, e-commerce education, and it goes all the way up to YouTube channels. So there's a boatload of stuff. So no matter where you slot into the WordPress community, this is a free way to get yourself noticed a little bit.

I don't know if they're going to have a way of surfacing different things. I'm not sure for Hazel.

[01:06:18] Hashim Warren: That was totally me. I'm sorry about that.

[01:06:27] Michelle Frechette: I w I was meeting with them when they were showing this to me before it launched, before it was publicized. And I said, you know what we need someplace that can also, where people can submit their news and it aggregates out all of, out to all of the different news agencies where you would want a press release to go to.

And so pre [email protected] is coming certainly as well. I don't know if it's actually got a placeholder or if it's just going to, it might show at this point, but it's something that. The hero press is working on to be able to aggregate news and send it out to anybody who signs up for it. You know, just

[01:07:03] Hazel Quimpo: slowly here trying to make Nathan's job easier.

Exactly.

[01:07:10] Michelle Frechette: They mentioned that to Justin Tadlock and he was like, oh, that's a great idea, kind of thing. And, and like, I work at post status as well. Um, I keep saying that the British way status that instead of status, I don't know why.

But you know, I wanna, I want to be able to get that information for post status and so be to be able to sign up for something like that, as long as we publicize it well, and the rest of. Continue to talk about it. Others will put their news information in there and then we'll all be able to be informed of what's happening.

I mean, it it could sit there and languish if we don't use it. Of course. So the goal is that news agencies need to also be able to say, Hey, if you put it here, we'll all get it. And we can help you get the. What

[01:07:57] Nathan Wrigley: would be really nice here. I'd be really curious to see what they surface cause at the minute, in order to put this piece together and the longer piece which goes out, I basically create a list of about 20 pieces of news that I think are interesting each week.

So it's a bit pejorative, but I put that together and then whittle it down to 5, 6, 7, or eight or whatever to go into this show. So I leave some stuff out and I just have to make decisions about what I think is more interesting or not. And in order to do that, I use Feedly and I've basically subscribed to every single WordPress thing one at a time in Feedly, but it doesn't give me, so my list every week of things to either look out more or to discount is hundreds and hot.

Literally hundreds and hundreds of pieces of content every single week, just about WordPress. And there's no way of saying. It doesn't learn it. Doesn't feed it. Doesn't learn. It just, it's just an RSS aggregator, but I'd be interested to see if tofa and oh my goodness, Kate over there can can sort work on that over time.

And I don't know what the algorithm will

[01:09:05] Michelle Frechette: be. Yeah. Is that like, as somebody who's creating news, perhaps I would want to send that out with an embargo, right? So it's going to come out on Monday. Let's say there's news coming out on Monday. I want to tell you about it. What I have Matt Mullenweg on the WP coffee talk podcast.

I sent you Nathan, a LinkedIn advanced I sent, all of the different news aggregators that I could think of a Lincoln advance embargo in the information, but it let you listen to the podcast in advance. And once I released it within the hour, you could put out. You're your own thoughts about what we talked about and things like that.

So a news aggregator could do that for us, instead of just giving you an RSS feed of what's already been out to the public. It can give you information as it's happening and let you be part of the hype of putting out information, being the first to report on information, things like that. So I think that there's a difference between just picking up things that are being published and things that have yet to be published that are true, like news as it happens.

[01:10:06] Nathan Wrigley: It's interesting. The only one which does that Hashem is WP engine. That's the only one where I get what feels like like pre. I don't even know what the word is. I get content from WP engine in that feed and it feels like I'm getting advanced notice of things. I've no idea how I signed up for that, but it is.

It's a curious thing when I read it, I think, oh, that's yet to happen. Okay. That's curious. Well, no, cause it's in Feedly and I don't. Yeah maybe, maybe I got, yeah, maybe I got sent a link or something, but it was, it's quite interesting to see that those things up and coming anyway.

Fabulous project. If you have anything. Point of contact with WordPress, which I imagine you do because you're here. If you're not putting stuff on that website, if you don't create content, it's certainly something to bookmark so that you can go and consume the content and it's called find it wp.com.

If you want to know more about the wider goals of hero, press, then if you go to hero, press network.com, as Michelle said, they're fleshing out their offering. They've got they've got WP podcasts now where you can find it basically aggregates all of the WordPress related podcasts in all the languages as well, which is great.

And you can find out all about that over here at hero,

[01:11:31] Michelle Frechette: and you can support them because they are not charging anything for anybody to do these things. Yeah. So now they're actually using give WP, if you click through, you can see they, and, and Tofor has actually. Done something with it to show information that we don't actually have native and give WP yet.

And so he's actually done some customization to be able to show it and use it more like a Patrion so that you can continue to contribute, but it shows in the number of investors and how much they're receiving monthly. So at the top there, and then also you can see who the recent investors are using our our donor wall.

And so it's pretty cool that they're using WordPress products, not going outside to continue to fund what they're doing and also provide the service free of charge, but allow people to help contribute to it, to keep their family You know, eating and paying.

[01:12:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. A minute at the minute, they've got 31 investors a little over $400 a month.

And obviously they're trying to increase that. So in order to help them out, if you feel this project has value it's hero, press network.com forward slash support, or you can just click the button on the homepage and go. Gift WP plugin as well. That's great. Okay. Okay. Okay. Now one more crept in at the very last minute.

So this is so just, I knew nothing about this at all. So I am literally going to have the perfect,

[01:12:59] Michelle Frechette: I've been with post status about a little over a month now, writing for them and becoming more a part of the team there. In addition to what I'm doing at Stella WFP, of course, and I actually, some of it's crossing over really nicely.

And one of those things is, uh, most people know every Wednesday, sometimes it's Thursday because my life is crazy. But once a week, I post a long list of open jobs in WordPress. And I tweet that out with links to different career pages. And I have WP career pages.com is a site that I curate. As a result of that people are coming to me asking, do I know about this kind of job and sending me job opportunities and post status has a list of job opportunities.

And so one of the things that Carl Miller wanted me to do is become part of what happens when they get hired. They get higher podcast with. Part of the website and logging and things like that. So I'm talking about I'm blogging on post status about jobs and how to find a job, how to be better at HR, those kinds of things that have to do with getting hired and hiring within WordPress companies, but also underrepresented.

So I have two columns that I write there as a result. I said, why don't we have a career summit where we have a full day understanding how to do better recruiting, how to be recruited. And so we have WP career summit is coming up April 8th, 2022. It's about five weeks after the next word Fest, which will be on March 4th.

And the idea is we'll have sessions for job seekers and sessions for those who are employers. And so we'll have two tracks that run through the course of. With opportunities to learn how to, have a better portfolio online, how to write your resume better, how to do better interviewing. And then from the opposite side of that, how to better to evaluate candidates, how better to recruit for diversity and inclusion, things like that.

And so that's going to be a full day coming up, April 8th and as a part of that, we're actually going to use the word Fest platform that we have. So there will be the opportunity for sponsors to have their own private rooms, right? So these little tables that you can, that we set up for you that are basically sponsor rooms, and you'll be able to talk about your company within them set up interview times for people receive resumes, things like that.

So it'll be a full job, fast job fair as well as learning opportunities within the.

[01:15:20] Nathan Wrigley: What a fascinating idea, the the dates again. So it's WP Korea summit. It's next year, April the eighth, 2022. I know these days I don't apply for jobs nor do I ask people to apply to jobs. But if I were ever to Australia into that territory, I know for a fact that I'd be terrible at it.

And so it would be really useful for me to attend something like this to actually up my game and be a better candidate, but also a better interview, a better person offer and a job. Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah. So no URL for that yet the,

[01:15:55] Hazel Quimpo: it

[01:15:55] Michelle Frechette: will be WP career summit.com, but doesn't exist yet. One of the nice things about it is stellar WP is the primary support for this.

So the primary sponsor we're going to be wireframing the site, so that we'll have something to build probably be using some cadence blocks to do that as well. Since I like to keep things in the family and We also are going to be, I'm using me. You know, it's, this is one of those crossover areas where I get to do something for the community within stellar and also within post status and provide the service to the greater community.

It'll be free to attend. The only thing we'll be charging for is sponsorships. And because we believe in paying people what they're worth, we're actually going to be giving honorariums to all of the speakers that day. So if you apply to speak, when you're selected, you will be paid for that.

[01:16:46] Nathan Wrigley: That is nice.

That's really nice. Yeah. Yeah. This looks like a fabulous event and a lots you really are getting on the bandwagon early. Aren't you've got what? Six months, six months to plan it and get it all executed. That's great. Yeah, that's really good. And it's a lovely platform that they've built over it. Word Fest.

Really good. So rock solid, nice experience for the users as well. I have one more thing. I don't know if anybody wants to drop in a pick of the week. It not, doesn't have to be anything to do with WordPress. If you do, you can put it in the little private chat. If you've come across something. This week I was saying that to our guests, not to the audience, although if you've got something in the audience and you want to stick it in the chat, do that as well.

This just came across my radar in the last couple of weeks. It's a design tool. It's free to download as far as I can see it's called. I don't know how to pronounce that. Swatch swatch, something like that. Swatch I'm guessing. And it's from. Linux and windows. And it's just a little app, which you can use to go around and do things like create color palettes.

You can obviously use like the eyedropper tool. It'll check for color contrast to make sure that your colors are contrasting in a way which makes them manageable and readable by everybody on the internet. And it's the best thing is it's totally free. It costs you nothing at all. So you can find this at swatch.

Oh, I'm going to have to spell that. S w a C H dot. And I just thought I'd drop that one in

a few seconds.

[01:18:23] Michelle Frechette: The week is Hazel's tweet. I don't know if you can, if you've got that

[01:18:28] Hazel Quimpo: there.

[01:18:33] Nathan Wrigley: Can I, so I'm going to start with Michelle's. Twitter one is not okay. This oh, okay. Perfect. Let me put this up. Okay what's going on in here? The ultimate.

[01:18:49] Michelle Frechette: So for Halloween, it's already had the purple hair I took off my glasses. Give a damn

[01:18:57] Hazel Quimpo: sign.

[01:18:58] Nathan Wrigley: What's the give a damn. Do you

[01:19:02] Hazel Quimpo: ever talk to, if you ever talked to me more than a few minutes, so you'll get an animated about certain things.

[01:19:07] Nathan Wrigley: And I just, you I just do give a damn and it's it's to my detriment and my success.

Oh, okay. And you want me Hazel to mention spark Toro? All of this was something

[01:19:21] Hazel Quimpo: we were going to share. Interesting facts that support TAROS Rand Fishkin is latest tool that has been from MAs. He's been SEO captain of the world forever part.

Tyrell's been really cool and finding out like where your audience hangs out. Now, a lot of these WordPress audiences, they hang out in the same spots, but it's really interesting. You find these weird little niches of YouTube channels and like all the way down to like really micro influencers that people are following and listening to for whatever thing.

[01:19:49] Nathan Wrigley: So you would, you're using this as a w what's the, I can see what now what it does, but why would you need it? What's the,

[01:19:57] Hazel Quimpo: so I would use it to go and find out that, oh, a lot of people that are using give WP, find out about their news from WP build it, we'll find that out and I have that.

And then you have this whole, and then for whatever other niche they might be in, cause give WP would also, there's a lot of people talking in the nonprofit world. So you find these weird little corners that they're talking about, the product

[01:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: that's so cool. So this is gone Hashim. Yeah. It's

[01:20:21] Hashim Warren: great for finding um, people to collaborate with who are making content advertising.

That's not programming advertising. You know, it's really great finding that I love sparkling.

[01:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Huh. Okay. I'm not yet. Another thing that I've never heard of, this is brilliant. I love it. When there's stuff like this, I've now lost probably the rest of my day. I can see the way this is going to go.

And last one is from Hasheme it's ignite 2021. This is tomorrow.

[01:20:56] Hashim Warren: Yes, it's tomorrow. This is an event series that we're putting on for anyone who's new to headless WordPress. We have a new product that helps you transition from creating templates and we're pressed with PSP to create templates for headless WordPress easing react.

It was called . So we have a training that's free for anyone to come on and go step by. Step on how to do this. Your first headless website. So my I did the first event. This event is being put on by my colleague, but I will be in the chat answering any questions that people have about headless WordPress.

So really excited.

[01:21:36] Nathan Wrigley: So this is at 2:00 PM. CST. What CST? Sorry.

Okay. So a little later. Okay. So that's what it should see. You should be for Chicago Chicago standard time. So that's tomorrow, if you go to events dot WP, engine.com and probably search for ignites 2021 and you can sign up by the looks of it by clicking this red button. What about headless?

WordPress and Hashim is going to be there in the chat. So you've got no excuse. Oh, I have gone through my little laundry list of things I wanted to talk about today. I'm going to, I'm going to go around one at a time. And if you've got anything you want to add, like your Twitter handle or where you can be contacted or any book that you've read lately, anything you like, let's go with Michelle first.

[01:22:30] Michelle Frechette: I have just been doing so many of all the things that I'm, I think I mentioned them already, but my, as I always say, my DMS are open I'm on Twitter at Michelle aims and also at stellar

[01:22:42] Nathan Wrigley: WP. Thank you so much, Hazel.

[01:22:46] Hazel Quimpo: Yeah, I don't have anything additional to either other than Michelle joined today. I don't actually know what our seller marketing team is growing like crazy today because Carmen Kendrick, Jen LearnDash today and Kathy.

Joined uh, looking at other product cadence today. So our marketing team is just exploding today. It's the big day she joined. She joined today as well.

[01:23:11] Nathan Wrigley: You are on a clip, aren't you guys, there's a lot of hiring going on.

[01:23:17] Hazel Quimpo: Anybody looking for a job?

[01:23:21] Nathan Wrigley: Can I have a job of, I dunno, attending world camps?

Will you pay for me to get,

[01:23:26] Hazel Quimpo: yeah, I you're joking, but if anybody's interested in a job of any sort.

[01:23:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Thanks for that.

[01:23:36] Hashim Warren: On Twitter is Hasheme underscore Warren. And if he wants to talk about WordPress or react or comic books you can follow me in, unless let's

[01:23:49] Nathan Wrigley: chat it up.

There you go. A little nugget at the end there, comic books. We didn't know that about you. And now we do. Yeah, that's cool. Oh, nice.

[01:23:57] Michelle Frechette: DC or whatever the other one is

[01:24:00] Hashim Warren: for me um, for DC it's Batman and for Marvel it's any of the X-Men comic books. So like I work to be able to afford my comic book habit, but it's specifically XPLAN and Batman that I really love

[01:24:19] Hazel Quimpo: comic books or you've ever been to in your life. I need to know what and

[01:24:22] Hashim Warren: where, oh my goodness. So right now in Greensboro, we have a fantastic comic store called acne.

The customer service is very I'll say, small town, no, your name, no way. Be able to recommend something. They follow you on Twitter and things like that. But one of the other best ones is actually a really large one where there's none of that personalization, but you can have great conversations in there.

And that's Midtown comics in Manhattan. I grew up in Manhattan. It was my local

[01:24:58] Hazel Quimpo: say again, well known. Oh

[01:25:02] Hashim Warren: yeah. They're really well known. You have a lot of the comics creators. Come by cause it's in New York, so it's really, it's like the exact opposite of acne comics. So I love the big store.

I love the small store, a support your local comic store,

[01:25:20] Nathan Wrigley: because I've got a couple of mates who are really deeply into comics. And for some reason that habit passed me by, I like literally I can count on one thing, the amount of comic style from start to finish on actually no fingers. Let's be honest.

And did you, is that like a habit which you got as a kid?

[01:25:39] Hashim Warren: Yes. So as a kid, I collected comic books, but then I lapsed until I would say right after college. And I got into Spiderman again and just fell in love with different creators and it started to follow them regardless of what character now I'm into different characters.

But a lot of the things that tweet about or tweet about right now are like suggestions for people who are. Either getting into comics or buying like gifts for people because now that comic books, they you know, collections are a big thing. I'm the bus collections out collect the whole run of a creator or a specific collections are collected a storyline.

It's a really great gift and a really great way to jump on to comment. So one little suggestion Todd McFarling, his, uh, his omnibus of amazing Spiderman just came out again. They got reprinted. That's a good one to jump on and kind of UC coats that black Panther. So this is like a over a hundred pages.

Of his black pants or run that you can buy. That's a really great hopping on point

[01:26:46] Nathan Wrigley: to this, this is a true story. When I was at 17 years old, I had a friend who I mentioned his name, but he had the first 500 additions of a comic called 2000 de D all in cellophane, never read. He bought two copies.

He bought one copy, which he kept in cellophane. And then he read the other copy. He had 500 all of the first 500 in pristine brand new condition. We went to university. And his mom cleared his room whilst he was out. She just trashed them all. They were worth tens of thousands of pounds, just the first one alone

that were under his bed. He came back. He was livid. As you can imagine, he still has

[01:27:34] Hashim Warren: it right now.

[01:27:40] Nathan Wrigley: It's like throwing away a Vanguard or something. If you're, if that's. Yeah. That's how it, anyway, we've totally used up our time. I appreciate that little segue at the end there. That was a really curious little way to finish it. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back this time. Next week, this episode will come out tomorrow morning as a podcast episode, but I'm sorry to do this to you, but we have to do this because I have to request it.

I need everybody to wave. I need everybody to just to put their hand in the air and with that, I'm going to use, Hazel's not doing it, that she's not doing the way you she's refusing that. And and I'm going to end the stream and I'll see you next week.